Читать книгу The Book of Rapture - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 11

‘Our country’s smelling of blood.’

‘Why, Mummy, is it hurt?’

Motl and you had swivelled your heads to the cupboard under the stairs, to the voice-that-couldn’t-help-itself coming from inside it. Mouse. Of course. ‘Stop tuning in, you,’ his father had remonstrated, ‘you listen too much.’

You demanded the notebook your boy was filling up.

Well, well. Like a forensic detective he’d been recording all the new chatter about him, trying to work his new country out. You sighed. This needed a talk. Because yes, your nation was changing. Battening down the hatches, locking the rest of the world out. And it was becoming increasingly uncomfortable for the likes of your family. The way you lived was seen by others as lost and bloated and wrong, people like you were being stained by the religion of your parents and grandparents, your reluctant past was becoming nigh on impossible to shake off; like some homeless dog endlessly tagging along and butting up close.

‘It’s a fear plague, isn’t it? It’s coming.’

Your little boy’s deep brown eyes, that went on forever, implored to be treated as an adult.

‘Sssh, it’s okay, it’s all right.’ As you held his silky head to your hugely beating heart.

All the empty soothing platitudes and how you hate them now. Because they believed them, they trusted you. And all you are left with now are the books, all that male strut and threat you’ve always dismissed with a snort. Never really looked at. Carefully you sew your quilt, carefully you sew, writing in the dead language you haven’t used for so long, stretching your brain like a pianist’s fingers over keys, untouched for decades, and it all flooding back. Sew the words, sew.

One religion is as true as another.